Samsung 9100 PRO
Samsung’s PCIe 5.0 SSD: up to 14,800 MB/s and 8 TB, if your PC has an M.2 Gen5 slot to take advantage of it.
Why we recommend it
The 9100 PRO is Samsung’s PCIe 5.0 SSD: up to 14,800 MB/s sequential read speed, twice that of the 990 PRO, with an in-house 5 nm controller and capacities from 1 to 8 TB. It makes sense if you edit video, work with local AI models, or move large files on a PC with an M.2 Gen5 slot.
Before buying, check your motherboard. If it has an M.2 heatsink over the Gen5 slot, choose the bare version and use that one: the heatsink version costs US$20 more and, according to Samsung’s datasheet, removing the heatsink voids the warranty. The heatsink version is a better fit for a motherboard without its own heatsink or for the PS5.
It is not for systems without Gen5. In a PS5, on a PCIe 4.0 motherboard, or in a Thunderbolt 5 enclosure, the port is the bottleneck and it performs like a previous-generation SSD. For PC gaming, TechRadar and Club386 agree that PCIe 4.0 is enough. In those cases, the 990 PRO does almost the same thing and costs less.